The reason I bring up the difference between verbatim copying and "typing things in themselves" is because I think the Federal Circuit was myopic in how it applied the merger doctrine, and I think the District Court got it right. The merger doctrine basically says that an expression is not copyrightable if the expression is inextricably merged with the idea.

So I'm imagining a bunch of Java classes loaded into memory. They're objects, and they have methods, and those methods refer to methods in other objects. Creating this state of memory is functional, and definitely not protect-able. Now, the interface declarations, then, are just a description of this state of memory. A method has a particular name or a particular set of parameters but those are just a description of the functionality, and there is no other way to precisely describe that state of affairs. The closest analogue I can think of to an API is a phone book, and the names and addresses in a phone book are not copyrightable, although higher-level structure might be.

I think the court got stuck on the verbatim copying and that prevented them from seeing things this way.